Abstract

PHILOSOPHY Echoing Demystified Aspirations: Human Flourishing and the Dialectic of Happiness Patrick Joseph Ahern Dissertation under the direction of Idit Dobbs-Weinstein The question of the possibility or even the concern for human happiness has proven to be a point of contention for political thinkers confronting the ideological injunction to be happy in the face of material conditions that stifle the capacity for human flourishing. It can be argued that the appeal to human happiness as a political norm occludes as much as it may reveal, and that the cult of happiness is the domain of the internalized oppressor, severing the avenues of self-reflection, social critique, or political praxis. In the writings of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, a dialectical notion of happiness emerges that critiques naïve conceptions of happiness that depend upon redemptive flight or accommodation. A historical approach to political theorizing, through the lens of the concern for human flourishing is enacted through a careful critical engagement with three political theorists that attempt to construct a politics dedicated to human flourishing while informed by human beings in their practical social activity. The notions of happiness for each of these thinkers is addressed and critiqued in the context of the broader aspirations of their respective political theories. Hobbess reversion to the idolatry of the Leviathan, Spinozas attempt to form a theory of the organization of social institutions informed by a defense of radical democracy, and Marxs attempt to perform a critique of ideology and the modern state while constructing a revolutionary politics illuminate the challenges that confront the development of a praxis that is resistant to accommodation while not relinquishing the constructive capacity to transform and organize a world in which the promise of happiness could be realized. In this dissertation, I argue that the dialectic of happiness as presented by Adorno and Benjamin, in its affinity with embodied and historical experience, forms the negative relief upon which the demand for human happiness can find expression. In providing an accounting of the manner in which attempts to realize happiness have failed, this dissertation elucidates what is left for the critical idea of happiness